CMC, Human, and Mass Communication

   Today, the Internet enables people to communicate with each other, and it supports mediated human communication. According to Ong (1982), "In real human communication, the sender has to be not only in the sender position but also in the receiver position before he or she can send anything. ... Human communication is never one-way. Always, it not only calls for response but is shaped in its very form and content by anticipated response".

   In face-to-face communication, the voice is the channel for the symbolic environment of speech that is used to create spoken language. When using CMC, the computer network becomes the symbolic environment in which human communication occurs.

   Used as a communication medium, the Internet supports one-to-one (e-mail), one-to-many (Web pages), many-to-one (surfing the Web for information), and many-to-many exchanges of messages (discussion lists and conferences). Consequently, the Internet can be used to carry both mass and human communication, and it is a hybrid mixture of both. The hybrid nature of the Internet makes it a difficult medium to study precisely because it incorporates aspects of both human and mass communication.

   Traditionally, the communication discipline has been separated into the two distinct areas: human communication and mass communication. Each of these has its own separate theoretical backgrounds, research perspectives, and literature foundations, and so students have often regarded these as two different areas of communication studies. Now, the Internet brings them together. Before the Internet, breaking communication studies into human or mass communication was fairly easy.

   Communication that occurred in a face-to-face setting (interpersonal, small group, organizational, public speaking) fell into the category of human communication. In contrast, communication that was mediated (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books) could be categorized as mass communication. For some reason, many textbooks describing human and mass communication neglected to discuss the telephone. Like the Internet, the telephone does not neatly fit into a category because it is a medium that can be used to support human communication that does not require a face-to-face setting.